Does being paid to take surveys cost anything?
June 30th, 2008
Paid surveys and adverts for them seem to be everywhere you look when you are using the internet. Many of these adverts say that you can afford to leave work and fill in surveys full time, and all from the comfort of your own home. But are these surveys worth it, and does being paid to take surveys cost anything?
If you have been thinking about joining paid survey sites and want to find out more you might have clicked through some of these adverts only to find that they want you to pay to access survey site information. This puts many people off and for good reason. Surveys are conducted for many reasons, sometimes it is to gain public opinion on certain subjects, they can be used to trial potential advertising campaigns for large companies, see what the public think about names for new products and much more. Companies who want these surveys conducted will pay survey companies to send these surveys out to their members and return the results – so you should not have to pay to take surveys.
It can be very tempting to pay to get ‘insider information’ on what are the best paid survey sites and a lot of people fall for this and pay their money only to receive a list of survey companies – which is often out of date. Once you have this list you can then access it whenever you like, but you have still, in effect paid for a list of survey sites that you can easily find by yourself on the internet. You could of course argue and say that by paying for such a list you are cutting down the amount of time that you will need to spend searching the internet for paying survey sites. This is fine if you are happy to pay out this money, but surely if you are looking to make some extra money the last thing you need is to be paying out more!
In short if you want to benefit from being paid to take surveys you should not be spending money to do it – it should be free. Once you have signed up to survey sites you will be able to start being paid to take surveys straight away – as long as the sites have surveys for you to take at that moment. Many survey sites will send you one or two surveys per week and the amount that you will be paid per survey will vary. It is up to you which surveys you choose to complete, you will not be penalised for not completing every survey that gets sent to you, although if you miss too many you may be sent an email asking if you still want to keep your membership for certain sites. Before you know it you could be completing many surveys each week and being paid to take surveys which can lead to a nice balance in your savings account, what are you waiting for?